Look!
(Photo: Chris Mitchell)
It’s a sink on top of a toilet, in which you wash your hands with the water that then refills the cistern. This is the smartest piece of design I’ve seen for weeks.
For more Japanese (of course) space-boosting cleverness, see the full article – A Very Short Walk Around a Tokyo Apartment.
I don’t speak any German, but I didn’t have any trouble understanding this message, which appeared when I was trying to reach a page on a German site:
I like languages which are so close to English you can translate them without knowing any words. Once, at school, we were asked to translate a page of Dutch, and of course we all panicked because we didn’t know any Dutch, and then we read the page and it was full of sentences like “Santa Claus ist un olden menn met un lang witt bard”.
Boris’s victory, maddening and saddening though it is, failed to mar an otherwise wildly successful weekend. I’ve never been to a Palace game where we won by anything like as huge a margin. Burnley had nothing to play for, but the other side’s indifference hasn’t stopped us failing to set the game on fire in the past, and the team played really smart and well-put-together football. Particularly pleasing was the fact that every goal was scored by someone different. Full match write-up here.
Even more pleasing was our 5th-place finish, which sees us meet Bristol City in the playoffs. We managed to get tickets for the home leg, which takes place this Saturday. Two games in a week! I am a genuine bona-fide fairweather fan. Good.
It was weird, though: I can’t remember having been to a game where we’ve led by more than one goal in the final minutes. Even when we’re winning I’m used to spending that last quarter of an hour in a state of arm-chewing tension, but you can’t even make a pretence of that when you’re five goals ahead. I felt strangely cheated.
In other news, Ronnie won the snooker and tfl.gov.uk won the People’s Choice for Government website award in the webbys. And it was a three-day weekend. I know I should be more upset about Ken – and I am, really I am – but I can’t seem to shift this good mood. It’s probably not worth fighting it, is it?
My main concern about Boris – aside from the embarrassment of living in a city that has Boris Johnson as its mayor – is not that he’ll introduce madcap, ill-considered transport policies, but simply that his essential lack of interest in public transport means we’ll lose momentum on what has been, for the last eight years, a quite incredible series of improvements and innovations. The mayor has a lot of power – more than almost any other civic leader – and it’s because of that power that Ken’s been able to introduce so many changes in such a short time. What he’s done here has been visionary, and it looks as though we’re about to lose that for the sake of a weak punchline, which as far as I can judge is the main reason people have voted for Boris (staunch Tories aside). It’s just like the population census we had a few years ago, when everybody thought it would be hysterically funny to declare themselves Jedis. Only worse, because at least then people didn’t have their lame laugh at the expense of something worthwhile.
Latest estimates show Boris in the lead in the first count of the votes for mayor of London. This is incomprehensible; the man is a first-class idiot. I’m crossing all my fingers, toes and everything else I can think of for an eventual Ken victory after the second-preference count. It hurts a bit.
Last night’s game was lots of fun, despite it not ending with the result I was hoping for. The upside of Chelsea winning is that I can support Man U in the final: if Liverpool had got through I’d have been supporting them and heading for almost certain heartbreak. It’s also kind of cool that the two teams who are (realistically) fighting for the Premiership will now also meet in the Champions’ League final. I haven’t been so interested in the English Premiership in years. Well, since 15 May 2005.
Anyway, none of that is nearly as exciting as the culmination of the Championship campaign this weekend. Palace are still in sixth, and can be overtaken by any or all of Wolves, Ipswich Town or Sheffield Utd if we fail to beat Burnley at home on Sunday. Startlingly, tickets for this game have nearly sold out (according to the club’s website, at least), so me and my fellow fairweather matchgoers may have to take the unlikely step of booking in advance.
I’m also going to have to take a radio for listening to the other results, and a piece of paper and a pencil for working out what they all mean. Wish me luck.
I’ve been forgetting to mention the books I’m reading. This month I finished two which have nothing in common except being less about trains than their titles suggest…
Off the Rails by Lisa St Aubin de Teran is subtitled “Memoirs of a train addict”, but as it turns out trains are only a tangential part of the story. It seems to be out of print, which is why I haven’t linked to it, but in any case I would heartily recommend not reading it. What it loses in loving descriptions of trains and train journeys it gains in loving descriptions of Lisa St Aubin de Teran and how wonderful she is. I’ve no doubt it’s true, but it didn’t endear her to me, nor make for an enjoyable read. Plus, I wanted to read about trains, so I was doubly disappointed.
Closely Observed Trains, on the other hand, is a light, sweet, melancholy read that I forgive for not having very much to do with trains. I enjoyed it very much at the time, but – having moved on to very different things since – can’t remember all that much about it.
Neither of them is as much fun as my favourite book about trains, which now I come to think of it is also not about trains. But Murder on the Orient Express, which runs it a close second, is. That’s how you write a train book that stays in print, Lisa!
Listening to the radio this morning, I came to the conclusion that there are some words which should be banned from news reporting. “Terror” instead of “terrorism” is the obvious one – it’s pointless and it leads to nonsensical coinages like the one above, which I have seen more than once.
But there are others which are just lazy. The one which raised my ire earlier was a reference to the “fuel crisis” which, at this stage, barely even counts as a crisis for the people it’s happening to, let alone the rest of us. Then the increasingly belligerent John Humphrys, in a conversation with David Cameron (for whom I have no love) during which Cameron barely edged a word in, used the word “fiasco” to refer to an event so unfiascolike (what? it’s a word) that I can’t even remember what it was.
I propose a ban on lazy clichés in news reporting. No crises, no fiascos, no terror. The only exception should be use of the suffix “-gate” to describe a faintly scandalous occurence, which should be made compulsory where the location of the event already ends in “gate”. I want to see a story about Tessa Jowell roaming around SE14 dressed in combat gear and waving an Uzi described as “New Cross Gategate”.
The sun is out! And someone somewhere is having a barbeque. I couldn’t be happier.
Yesterday was National Walk to Work Day. I didn’t manage to walk to work (I barely managed to get out of bed), but I did walk home, through some of the unloveliest parts of south London. And yet. There’s so much more you see when you’re at ground level – much more, even, than you see from the bus, which I have always thought of as a fairly intimate means of travel. But I had never really noticed the war memorial at Stockwell, much less the lists of names engraved on it of Stockwell residents who died in the two world wars; including what looked like a whole family whose surname was “Burnley”, who I only noticed because Palace are playing Burney next weekend so the word jumped out at me. But there’s a story behind every name, and they’re probably all worth hearing.
Anyway, including a brief stop at the war memorial, two even briefer stops to smell lilac growing in people’s front gardens (lilac coming second in my list of smells that make me think of childhood summers, the first being hyacinths) and ten minutes in MK One buying wedding outfit accessories (not my wedding, someone else’s), the whole thing took an hour and a half. Which is…manageable. I might even do it again. But not today.
Glad All Over 